I'VE SPOKEN often in recent weeks on how this year's Portsmouth High boys' basketball team was good, but not as good as the two prior clubs that posted perfect championship seasons. I'd like to amend...

Two amendments: Defended in West Virginia

Jared Marcum is a 14-year-old West Virginia boy who likes the Second Amendment, as teenage boys in West Virginia often do. To express that affection, he wore a National Rifle Association T-shirt to school last Thursday. For that, he got expelled - and arrested.

In 2004, a 13-year-old Vermont boy named Zachary Guiles wore an anti-George Bush T-shirt to school. It depicted Bush doing drugs. Guiles was ordered to cover parts of the shirt, and in fighting the school he became a national "First Amendment poster boy." The ACLU represented him, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Marcum has had no such luck with the institutions of the American left. As of this writing, the ACLU has not gotten involved in his case, and the mainstream media have given the story minimal coverage. Still, he has support.

Marcum's shirt simply displayed the NRA logo. A teacher pulled him out of the cafeteria line and ordered him to remove the shirt or turn it inside out. He refused and was sent to the principal's office, where he refused the same request, as the shirt did not violate the school dress code posted on the school's website. After that, Marcum was arrested.

On Monday he returned to school - wearing the same shirt. In solidarity, 100 other students in the county went to school in the same or similar shirts. It was an act of mass civil disobedience by teenagers in support of the First and Second Amendments. Consider that for a moment. As those kids might say: God bless America.